


Ink Me Up! Ink Me Down!

by StarkAstarte



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Tattoo Parlor, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Skinny Steve, Steve Rogers is a mouthy little shit, Tattoo Artist Steve Rogers, War Veteran Bucky Barnes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 11:40:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8889385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarkAstarte/pseuds/StarkAstarte
Summary: Bucky is a veteran. He's trying to get his shit together. He follows a random skinny, grumpy blond into a random broke-down tattoo parlour. Feels and angst ensue.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [OwnThyself](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OwnThyself/gifts).



> This is old! I'm thinking I should keep on with it. Let me know if you agree, or if you think I should have left it in the Stucky Junk Drawer :^) Will change tags, warnings, and rating as needed in future chapters--for now, it's pretty non-complex. But this is Steve and Bucky. So shit will get complex real fast. Just like we love and want and need it to.

It was the kid’s hostility more than anything that made Bucky follow him into the tattoo shop. The way he hunched into himself, a scowl stapling his eyebrows together like they didn’t spend much time in their own natural habitats directly above the piercing eyes. The kid looked closed off. Guarded. Angry. Bucky could respect that. Hell, it was comforting. For the first time since he landed Stateside, he felt like he could actually relate to somebody. A perfect stranger on a derelict Red Hook side street, but whatever. It was something. By virtue of being absolutely nothing at all. Which was about as much as Bucky could handle.  Nothing was good. Nothing was his bag.

The weathered brownstone looked like it was on its last legs. Bucky wasn’t even sure the drooping stoop would hold his weight, until it did. Not a bad sign. Another good sign was the way the door stalwartly refused to jingle as Bucky pushed it open, hesitating to make sure there were no bells before he stepped inside. He didn’t do so hot with bells, chimes, squeaky dog toys—any of that shit. Even the hinges were well-oiled, which surprised him, given how banged up the storefront was otherwise. The shop was surprising in general. Nothing about the dingy exterior betrayed the clean, well-lit, downright pleasant and visually interesting interior. It was almost like the outside wore a scowl completely in keeping with the customer that drew Bucky to it to begin with. It wasn’t welcoming in the usual sense. If it was, Bucky would never have darkened the doorway. He didn’t believe in Fate or anything hokey like that. If he _did_ , what would that say about his life and the kind of karma he attracted, fucked in the head and half blown to shit as he was? But it was the kind of thing that made him feel like life wasn’t entirely random in ways he was pretty okay with.

He glanced around a bit, taking in his surroundings. Noting the exits, possible hindrances to movement, keeping the doors and windows in his line of sight at all times. The usual bullshit. It wasn’t like it was hard—the shop wasn’t much bigger than his one-room shithole apartment, if even. It was a damn sight nicer, though. Carefully curated artwork hung with precision in groupings that made emotional as well as aesthetic sense. The walls painted a shade of grey that Bucky really liked, sort of gunmetal with a subtle but unmistakeable undertone of blue. The trim was clean and white, the surfaces bare. Threadbare floorboards that nonetheless gleamed with pine-scented polish. No clutter, no cutesy kitsch. The furniture in the waiting room was spare. Worn but decent mid-century sofa and chairs upholstered in black leather. A glass coffee table to hold the neatly fanned back-issues of tat mags and art books. A few succulents and cacti in austere pots watched him gravely. He didn’t mind. Plants were okay. Better than people, most of the time.

It was just a shop, but it had the sort of atmosphere Bucky wished his own place had. He hadn’t been able to muster up much enthusiasm for interior decorating—too busy making it through the minutes and then hours and days and now weeks and months without a major freak-out. But this place felt good. Made him think maybe he could focus on making a livable space out of more than just his mental real estate. Sam would like that analogy. He’d make Buck pretend to feel good about his progress. So maybe Bucky wouldn’t tell him in so many words. Avoid the hassle altogether. Besides, Sam clearly didn’t need to praise Bucky for him to feel like he knew what the man would say. More progress. He wasn’t sure it was the kind Sam was going for, but it was probably a good sign.

He stood for a long time, intently absorbing every detail. If he noticed that the kid he’d followed was nowhere in sight, he put it down to him having disappeared behind one of the closed doors. Private tattoo areas: another good sign. Bucky wasn’t sure if he was here because he really wanted anything on offer, but Sam said it was good to follow his whims. He hadn’t been struck by whimsy in a long time. And this didn’t really feel like it was that, anyway. It was more like another phantom pain had started to surface. Now that he’d gotten more accustomed to dealing with the loss of his arm, he was starting to miss things that seemed a lot more ephemeral. Not just the weight and solidity, the ripple of muscle over bone beneath skin that no longer existed. There was more to an arm than meat and gristle. There were all the other things that made that arm uniquely his. Constellations of scars from a happyish childhood and a reckless adolescence. The fine pelt of hairs adding definition to the musculature. Other things, too. The way that arm had been decorated, for instance. He found lately he missed that more than the thrum of blood rushing from his heart to his fingertips. Sometimes he thought the idea of all of that beautiful ink blister-burning up was harder to stomach than the severing of the arm that wore it. Loss was strange that way. It hit you a thousand times over in a thousand different guises, like a stranger you recognized.

And then there were the strangers who surrounded you every day. The stranger you were in the mirror.

If Bucky hadn’t heard the door open quietly to his left, he mightn’t have actually heard the kid come back out into the shop. He had a soft, deliberate tread. Not really a common civilian virtue. Civilians stampeded all over the place like herds of oblivious cattle, entitled to take up as much space and air as they could get. Bucky took a step back, putting a chair and another foot’s distance between them, making sure the exit was on his side of the barricade. The kid’s sharp blue eyes flickered, and he smiled grimly, brow still stapled together. He looked at Bucky with a shrewd expression, like he knew exactly what he was doing.

“Hey, man, relax,” he said gruffly. “I’m only licensed to stab you with sharp objects _after_ you sign a waver.”

Bucky stared at him. “You work here?”

The kid shrugged. “I’ve gotta. I own the place. I’m not exactly flush with eager minions, in case you ain’t noticed.”

Bucky glanced around. “Or, like. Customers.”

“Hilarious. But, yeah. Not exactly on the beaten track, you know what I mean? But I’m not bitching. We’ve got our regulars. We get by.

“ _You_ do, you mean.”

“Huh?”

“ _You’ve_ got your regulars. It’s just you, right? No eager minions.”

“I share the space with a piercer, who is MIA and scheduled to be DOA when he finally shows up. Not that I can’t handle his roaring trade myself. I got that kind of licence, too. Both kinds of poking with sharp things.”

Bucky nodded. “Got it. Not the Royal We, then.”

“Not so far. Expecting the coronation announcement any day now, so. I’ll keep you posted.”

“What, King of Red Hook?”

The kid shrugged, starting to let his austere smile filter through to his eyes. “Brooklyn kid’s gotta do what a Brooklyn kid’s gotta do. But I guess you’d know all about that, DUMBO fodder like yourself.”

Bucky started to smile himself. “That obvious? What gave me away?”

“Certain way of talking, I guess. I got an ear for the home-borough cadence."

Bucky nodded. He felt something complicated rising up inside of his interior real estate. He wasn’t used to anybody listening to him that close, other than Sam, who listened for a different reason. Not that he knew why this kid did anything. He didn’t even know him. But something about him just. Felt okay. And that was a feeling Bucky’d been learning to chase. Not whimsy, but. Okayness. And he had a feeling this kid was more than okay, over all. It scared him, and it didn’t. And that was a bit scary right there, too.

The kid began to relax minutely, leaning up against the glass display case, folding what looked to be a very lean pair of arms beneath his baggy black hoody across a proportionally narrow chest. “So, did you, like, come in here to yak about the old stomping grounds, or did you want something?”

Bucky shrugged, keeping the kid in his periphery as he looked out of the window to scan the horizon. “Storm’s coming. Maybe I just wanted a place to duck my head, keep dry.”

The kid shrugged again. “Suit yourself. It’s not like we’re busy. Grab a seat. Don’t feel like you gotta make constant small talk, ’cause I’m just about full up and running out of it, myself.”

Bucky looked back at him and smirked. “Noted.” He waited for the kid to go back behind the counter and start shuffling things around before he took a cautious seat in one of the surprisingly comfortable chairs. Comfortable but not _too_ comfortable. Bucky usually preferred a straight-backed kitchen chair, but this was. Again. Surprisingly Okay. He kept the kid in his periphery as he picked up a binder of photographs, row after row of fresh tattoos, the skin framing the new ink red and triumphant—presumably the kid’s work.

At first Bucky only glanced peremptorily before flipping to the next page. But then he started to pay attention, falling face-first into the intricate detail and subtle complexity of the designs. He started back at the beginning and actually examined each piece. It was remarkable work, even more so because the kid responsible for it looked like he’d yet to see his twentieth birthday. If Bucky had a sudden, unbidden flash of the long, sensitively-shaped fingers pressing down his skin to follow the contour of his shoulder with a buzzing, ink-filled gun, he tamped it down deep. He no longer had feelings like that. And even if he did. This kid was not his type. He didn’t have a type. Not anymore. Unless short, scrawny, and scowly was his new fetish. Hell, Sam was always riding his ass about trying new things. Bucky wasn’t sure if this was what he meant, but it probably wasn’t _not_ what he meant, right?

Bucky shook his head.

Told himself to forget it.

Problem was, he’d always had a tenacious mind. And now that it was busted, there was no telling what it would do with an idea once it’d got a hold of it.  

The storm came in as if somebody’d ordered it off of a takeout menu with extra thunder and a side of hail. Bucky watched from the requisitioned chair, no longer flipping through the binders. No need to distract himself from the life outside. People being blown across the sidewalk, leaning into each other, making a whole world of the spaces beneath busted umbrella cages. They made it look so easy. Proximity. Casual touch. Laughter. Light in the eyes and the swagger of confidence people who are loved seem to have in common. As if nothing can touch them unless they say yes. Make something new of me.

New ain’t always improved, though. Bucky of all people knew the score on that particular point. Every time he tried to flex the ache out of finger-joints that didn’t exist anymore, he remembered that. He’d been remade and it wasn’t any kind of useful renovation. He felt like a bombed-out building.  His own body a foxhole dug too deep and still no place of shelter. Like there was nowhere he could go now where hiding would do him a lick of good. Maybe Sam was right. Maybe hiding was the last thing he should be doing. He watched the people outside. Blowing wherever the wind pushed them. They clung to each other. That was the fucking difference. They had _ballast_.

Bucky had none. He was free-falling while telling himself he was floating. But floating was the same as falling when you didn’t have the first fucking clue where you’d get hung up or dropped down.

He looked up real casual at the skinny kid behind the counter. Bucky didn’t exactly get why he did that. The tiny blond couldn’t provide an anchor to a tablecloth at a picnic. And yet. He looked unshakable. He had this feel about him like he was daring the world to make its move on him. Like he wasn’t going any-fucking-where he didn’t decide was the direction he wanted. Bucky envied that. He’d never really been good at deciding where he was blown or where he’d land. But maybe. Just maybe. He’d get to decide how to handle the fall. And the struggle back to standing. He thought this kid might know a thing or two about that. Just a hunch in his gut. He didn’t trust it, exactly, but he took note.

Just then, lightning struck the world, and at that exact second, like in some kind of goddamn story, the kid looked at him clear and straight and bullshitless. They looked at each other as the lights snapped out across the city. Shaking their heads with twin smirks each other couldn’t see so much as feel. Sharing derisive chuckles like passing bread and butter across the table without being asked.

“Well, shit,” the kid huffed out.

“Yup, looks like.”

Bucky’s teeth flashed in the dark. He was fucking _smiling_. Like a fucking _moron_. The sudden feeling of camaraderie sucker-punched him right in the heart-meat. For a second, he felt like he might pass out. Even storms like this one no longer phased him, with its unpredictable percussiveness that used to send him diving for the nearest cubby-hole big enough to squeeze into. This kid did something to him, and he could no longer get a sense of whether it was a good something or a bad something, despite the earlier nebulous okayness he’d been so jazzed about. Not now that it was beginning to amplify and manifest in ways he couldn’t anticipate.  He held his breath to stop himself from gasping for it, and the kid’s eyes bloomed wide in the dark. He held up a placating palm without moving any closer. Bucky stared at it in horror. This was not happening. He wasn’t here. _This wasn’t happening_. Bucky closed his eyes and didn’t breathe.

Undaunted, the kid spoke in a low, hoarse, conversational tone. “Hey, man—everything’s cool. It’s 4 o’clock, May 27, 2016, and you’re safe in Brooklyn.  My name’s—”

Before he could get a chance to finish that sentence. Before he could realize what kind of a mess he was really dealing with, for all of his seeming awareness of grounding-the-psycho protocol, and opt instead for kicking him back out into the dwindling day, Bucky got his shit together enough to melt back into it. Soundless. As if he was never there. Sniper’s instincts never faded. They ebbed and flowed like a tide, like a moon in its phases. The good ol'  door didn’t betray him. No bells. No hinge-creak. It was like he was never there. Which was how he lived his whole life now. Just one more ghost in Brooklyn getting by, one breathlessness at a time.


End file.
